Teamwork : Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives

There are many walks of life in which teamwork is found and in which, by common consent, it could be better. Yet even the most basic questions about teams remain unresolved. What makes a group of individuals a team? Does teamwork involve a special type of reasoning? What makes teams successful? How do we learn to be team players? This volume brings together, for the first time, contemporary research from across the social sciences, addressing such questions from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives. Front Matter....Pages i-xxv Introduction: Teamwork in Theory and in Practice....Pages 1-21 A Theoretical Framework for the Understanding of Teams....Pages 22-32 Cognitive Cooperation: When the Going Gets Tough, Think as a Group....Pages 33-55 Cooperation, Risk and the Evolution of Teamwork....Pages 56-77 The Evolution of Teams....Pages 78-101 Cooperation and Communication: Group Identity or Social Norms?....Pages 102-135 The Psychology of Effective Teamworking....Pages 136-160 Teams over Time — a Logical Perspective....Pages 161-180 The Logic of Team Reasoning....Pages 181-199 Rational Agency, Cooperation and Mind-reading....Pages 200-215 Evolution of Cooperation Without Awareness in Minimal Social Situations....Pages 216-235 Learning in Robot Teams....Pages 236-251 Back Matter....Pages 252-253 Teamwork is studied in many disciplines, but there is as yet no comprehensive theory of teams. This collection brings together perspectives on teamwork from evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, robotics, philosophy, management and artificial intelligence. They introduce the reader to state-of-the-art research methods as diverse as laboratory experiments and evolutionary modelling, epistemic logic and the programming of robots. These are directed to answer questions such as: hat is a team? How did teamwork evolve? What factors make for effective teamwork? How do people mediate between conflicting team memberships? How is teamwork learnt?